Wednesday, December 31, 2014

“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.Destroy its books, its culture, its
history.Then have somebody write new
books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.Before long the nation will begin to forget
what it is and what it was.The world
around it will forget even faster.”

Milan Hübl (1927-1989)

History is written by the victors.Just now, it’s the centralists who are
winning across much of Europe.They have spied their opportunity and seized
it.But history hasn’t finished with
them yet.

There are three reasons why we take an interest in
regionalism on the mainland, and in the regions of France in particular.One is that a Wessex-centred world must view Brittany and Normandy as
a more meaningful ‘next-door’ than Northumbria
or Scotland, separated from
us by Mercia.That’s an illustration of how seeing things
from the perspective of the imperial states creates a bloc mentality that
really does block out other aspects of geographical reality.A second reason is practical solidarity,
because the Jacobin mindset is something that gets passed around Europe like a virus, finding new strength from new
victims.When Alsatians, Catalans or
Tyroleans suffer at the hands of control-freak states, we know very well that
we could be next.The third reason is
ideological solidarity, because English regionalism can be part of a
trans-European ideal, the Europe of a Hundred
Flags.If it fails to see itself in
those terms, then it will fail to achieve its potential to engage and enthuse.

How fares the Europe of a
Hundred Flags today?Very poorly, as one
imperial state after another starts to roll back the gains made since the
Second World War.Europe
is being restructured in ways that threaten to undo all its achievements in
terms of economic (and even political) democracy, social welfare, environmental
protection and cultural autonomy.All
these things need to be defended on a secure territorial basis, the basis provided
by regional identity.Our assets.Our institutions.Our neighbours.Our land.Our way of life.London parties not welcome.Amazingly, the mainstream Left can’t even
begin to understand the importance of this.Labour puts up candidates against the nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales
and Cornwall.What good can possibly come of that?Labour ekes out its existence as a parasite
on the system, having no views on how to change it for the better.In some ways, it’s set to make matters
worse.As its continental allies already
are doing.

France
has now definitively redrawn its regional map.The partly German-speaking region of Alsace
has come off worst, merged with two French-speaking regions to create ‘ALCA’ –
Alsace-Lorraine-Champagne-Ardenne, an area bigger than Belgium.It’s one of several such combinations, doomed
to be known by their initials, just like, as one French MP put it,
cattle-brands.Alsace heads a long list of regions to be
abolished as their number is reduced from 22 to 13.Others include such historic names as Aquitaine, Auvergne, Burgundy, Limousin and Picardy.The one
group who can celebrate are the Mouvement Normand, since the re-unification of Normandy is one feature
of the plan.Wessex
looks out at what will now be officially the coast of Brittany
and Normandy;
it’s only further inland that the chaos becomes evident!They can, as always, look back at Cornwall, with Wessex waiting to take its place
alongside.

So have the Normans
been good garcons and filles?It might
seem so to the Alsatians and the Bretons.These two peoples are ones whose loyalty to the French State
has often been regarded as suspect, as if loyalty isn’t something that has to
be earned.Now they’re the two peoples
most bitterly disappointed and with good reason to ask why they should remain
part of a State that won’t even recognise their existence.Brittany
remains truncated, while Alsace
will be wiped off the map.A challenge
has been launched in the Constitutional Council, alleging inadequate
consultation, but for now the plan is to implement the cull on 1st January
2016.

During the debates it was made clear that the restoration of
traditional provinces is not something that will be tolerated.Sometimes, as in the case of Normandy, it happens by
accident, but accidents do happen.Reorganisation is about improving the efficient, functional operation of
the French national territory, as viewed from Paris.Substitute ‘English’ for ‘French’ and ‘London’
for ‘Paris’ and
it becomes a familiar story.Indeed, an
article in The Regionalist in 1991
stated that “By introducing its own
definition of Brittany, excluding Nantes, France
has been able to sow confusion and to re-assure itself that Brittany
is, after all, only a French region that France can make and unmake at
will.”Before long the phrase was
taken up by Silesian autonomists arguing that the division of Poland into artificial voivodeships is likewise
a project to supplant historic provinces with regions that Poland can make
and unmake at will.Napoleon is as much
a hero to the Poles as to the French, having briefly liberated their country
from the surrounding empires.Yet in
both France and Poland,
notions of national liberty are built upon the ruins of regional identity.

Cross the Alps and we find that the ruling party in Italy
has introduced a Bill to reorganise the Italian regions, a cut from 20 to 12, replacing
historic names like Piedmont and Tuscany with Jacobin-style geographical labels
– Regione Alpina, Regione Appenninica, Regione Adriatica.The message is the same as in France, or England,
or Poland:
regions exist to help the centre manage its territory; they do not deserve to
exist as something worthwhile in their own right or to be an inspiration to
those challenging the centre’s monopoly of real power.

Two proposed casualties are the small regions of Valle d’Aosta and Trentino-Alte Adige, home to Italy’s
French-speaking and German-speaking minorities respectively.Both these areas have a special regional
status that was introduced following the defeat of fascism, in recompense for
persecution under Mussolini.The
German-speakers of south Tyrol feel particularly betrayed, with counter-demands
now being made for greater autonomy, independence and/or re-union with the rest
of Tyrol, from which this area south of the Brenner Pass
was separated after the First World War.

With France
and Italy deracinated, Spain can
expect to be next.One of the happy
peculiarities of regionalisation there was that the boundaries were left largely
to the locals to decide.And one result
of that was a relatively large number of single-province regions that saw no
need to link up with their neighbours.These account for 6 of the 15 mainland regions.So while there are some large regions with a
similar population to Wessex
– Andalucia and Catalonia for example – there
are others about the size of Cornwall
– Cantabria and La Rioja.Both these
smaller regions are required in their devolution statutes to allow for the
possibility of merger with their big neighbour Castilla-Leon and no doubt will
come under pressure to do the deed.It’s
interesting that Spain
is tightening up its anti-protest laws.Clearly, those in charge are expecting trouble.

Across Europe, the 2008
financial crisis has spawned new, happy-clappy parties and movements of the
Left.Their leaders talk a lot about
greater public ‘involvement’ in decision-making but are (un)surprisingly cagey
about who will actually take the final, unappealable decisions.Spain’s Podemos is an example,
opposing Catalan independence in favour of having some undefined wider
‘influence’.Moves to get the SNP into
formal coalition with Labour are part of the same outflanking manoeuvre that tries
to tempt with fleeting political concessions instead of agreeing the need for lasting
constitutional changes.(Though getting
to look at the real UK
accounts certainly WILL be tempting for Salmond and Sturgeon!)

Among the large continental states, that just leaves Germany, where
the possibility of re-drawing regional boundaries has come to the surface
several times since 1949.So far, the
democratic Germans have always put firm proposals to the vote and not since
1952 have the voters decided to agree a regional merger.(Even that was largely about re-uniting an
area that had been split by the zones of occupation.)Germany is often quoted as the
model for other continental countries.In France the debate
was driven – or poisoned – by the idea that France needs regions of ‘European
scale’.Yet Germany is actually marked by huge
diversity.There are regions like Bavaria, almost as big as Ireland,
but also tiny city-states like Bremen and Hamburg.

So what is a region of ‘European scale’?Does the EU have a view?The EU, sensibly, doesn’t.European statistics are kept on the basis of
regional and local units that ultimately are determined by the Member States’
own legislation.Sometimes that works in
favour of identity, as when Cornwall
obtained Objective 1 regional aid status, for which it would not have qualified
as part of a slightly more prosperous Devonwall area.Sometimes it can result in a kind of
statistical apartheid.Welsh local
government is planned to be reorganised again (for the third time in 50
years).The Williams Commission that
looked into the matter disappointed any nationalist who might have longed for
the reconstitution of Morgannwg or Gwent.The reason?That west-east split,
linking depressed coalfield areas to their respective, wealthier coasts, would
endanger European aid.So the poor
coalfield has to stick together, separate from the coast.In terms of the infrastructure European aid
might fund, it’s nonsense, as transport largely radiates from Cardiff
and Newport,
following the valleys from south to north.

So much for a Europe that
works for its peoples.Instead we have
inflexible funding rules – the Europe of the
figures – re-shaping our very constitution, for good or ill.The most sensible boundaries – in terms
of community geography – may be ruled out in favour of much less sensible
arrangements in order to save the funding.

Who
are the EU’s real masters then, if not us?A generation ago there was the fervent hope that an alliance of
europeanists and regionalists might be the twin millstones that would grind
away the imperial states, dividing up their powers between them.If the EU hasn’t been the most active of
allies, it’s perhaps because the European ideal has been much more easily
co-opted by the centralists, by those who wish to write the imperial-state idea
wider still.And that shouldn’t surprise
us.The EU is the creature of the
treaties that establish it and those treaties are written by the Member
States.They may concede consultative
institutions like the Committee of the Regions but they aren’t going to sign
their own death warrant.Rather than
meet the financial crisis by cutting their own wasteful spending and devolving
power, they look to save money by cutting out somebody else’s tier and
centralising power instead.Money
has to be saved now, urgently, if the centre itself is to be saved.Attacking any identity lucky enough to have
been respected this far is the quickest win.The promise in ‘The Vow’ to not abolish the Scottish Parliament
some time down the road is significant not because it was said but because it
was thought necessary to say it.

More recently, the EU bureaucracy itself has realised the
importance of keeping its national paymasters sweet.Barroso could have opened up a debate on
internal enlargement, about the further treaty changes needed to avoid any
ambiguity over what happens when part of a Member State
secedes.His neutrality was just too
Pilate-like for the EU’s own good.It
came across not as neutrality but as change-weariness.Not more treaty negotiations.Just to please the Scots and the
Catalans.Do they really think their
national freedom should matter that much?Juncker has already set the tone of his presidency, sceptical about environmental
and social protections that hinder Europe’s
bid to join the race to the bottom.His
warning to Greek voters about the kind of government they should or shouldn’t
elect is further proof that the ‘post-democratic’ Europe
advocated by Peter Mandelson is firmly taking shape.

Regionalists have always been wary of Europhile claims,
while equally distancing ourselves from Eurosceptic adoration of the imperial
states.There is a genuinely third way
that is not about those states, nor about a Jacobin map of Europe
where identity is to be erased as a barrier to ever closer union.Actions produce reactions and the current war
on identity will produce a renewed determination to resist.A determinaton to build a different Europe,
the Europe of a Hundred Flags, in place of the worthless regimes in London,
Paris, Rome and Madrid – and of their Brussels puppet.(That so many assume Brussels to be the puppet-master just shows
how well the imperial states know their work.)

We should increasingly expect to see nationalist and
regionalist parties succeed at the polls, making inroads into the dead thinking
of Europe’s indistinguishably conservative / socialist
establishment, while seeing off those equally indistinguishable challengers who
are just more of the same.

It’s been said, and not wholly in jest, that a nationalist
is a regionalist who means it.One who
isn’t fooled by the Labour Party or the Parti Socialiste into backing change that
isn’t really there.Many regionalists,
who’ve been deliberately moderate to win concessions from the centre that are
now being torn up in scorn and suspicion, will be asking whether separatism is
such a dirty word after all.States with
a more authoritarian tradition will be turning up the heat.States with a less authoritarian tradition
will be trading clunking old chains for sleek new wires.Either way, advocates of autonomy will need
to be careful who and what they trust.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

In the run-up to the festive season, all three main London parties set out
their stalls on English devolution.On the
whole, they’re rather against it.

Labour were first, with a promise to devolve power to ‘city
regions’ and ‘county regions’.Anything
but region regions.These areas appear
to correspond to those of the Local Enterprise Partnerships, business-led
quangos that have never faced the electorate before and won’t be facing it in
the future.Is Labour’s plan to hand big
business control of our money on a plate and pretend it’s what we, the people,
want?The lack of detail on governance
arrangements could imply pretty much anything.What is clear is that powers will not be devolved to directly elected councils:
if that was the plan, Labour would
have said so.

Labour have seen in Scotland what happens if you
devolve real power to substantial areas and they want no more of that.Having concluded that even the
pseudo-regionalism of the Prescott zones
constitutes too big a threat, they are now into ‘area-ism’, dividing England
into clumps of counties.The Environment
Agency’s new areas – it abolished its regions in favour of areas in April –
could provide clues as to where Labour may be heading.

The Siamese twins followed on Tuesday last week, with a
glowing end-of-term report they wrote themselves about how they’ve
decentralised power.Can’t say we’ve
noticed actually.Then appended to it
are the respective party positions of the Tories and FibDems.

For the Tories, English devolution is primarily about
strengthening the all-England dimension – devolution from the centre to the
centre – through English votes for English laws.True to their feudal roots, they reject
entirely the idea of regions in favour of local self-government, strictly
limited and deferential, under the watchful, absolute authority of a
Norman-style parliament supervising the children at play.As with Labour, their plans involve
concentrating power as much as possible in the hands of celebrity mayors with
the charisma to shut down any inconvenient debate.And, of course, they want to have another go
at breaking the link between local identity and parliamentary
constituencies.The paper makes no
reference to Cornwall,
the Cornish or national minority rights, but does mention all the other home
nations by name.

A few phrases stand
out.“There would be a presumption in favour of
devolution, but checks in place would aim to ensure powers were not granted
inappropriately.”Oh dear.The powers that Whitehall decides it’s
‘inappropriate’ to devolve are exactly the ones worth having.We have to build the political movement that
will force these creatures to acknowledge that subsidiarity means we decide what it’s appropriate to
centralise, not the other way round.

Then there’s local growth.The report launches straight into a discussion of how decentralisation
can accelerate growth.Hold on.Let’s first decide whether growth is
appropriate for our area, shall we?Not
according to the London
parties.EVERY initiative to regionalise
power in England
has been about the economy.Not ONE has
been about democratic choice.In the 1940s we
had Regional Boards for Industry.In the
1960s we had Regional Economic Planning Councils.In the 2000s we had Regional Development
Agencies. All applying an answer to a
question we never heard asked.Namely
how the ‘provinces’ can best contribute to enriching the City of London / HM
Treasury.Absolutely not how the regions
can set their own agenda.Every time they try that, the regional institutions
are abolished faster than you can say ‘distinctive sense of identity’.

According to the Planning Minister, Brandon Lewis, last week,
“Localism means a choice over how the
needs of communities are best met, not whether they are met.”Or even being allowed to say what they
are.Lewis was responding to an
adjournment debate initiated by Liam Fox, Tory MP for North Somerset, whose
trenchant criticism of the Government and its Whitehall machine might surprise those who
remember him being part of it just three years ago.Come April he’ll be telling everyone how
breathtakingly wonderful it’s all been.Hansard records that his neighbour, the
Tory MP for Weston-super-Mare, may have
similar concerns but, being still on the Government payroll, is barred from
voicing them.A jolly jape is this
ghastly game of ‘Parliamentary representation’, where one’s adoring
constituents are but meat to the procedural grinder.

All the parties continue to pick at the idea of a
constitutional convention.Either as a
way to come up with some workable fix (forget it) or as a way to send everyone
to sleep.We’ve been telling everyone
the most fundamental answer to the West Lothian question for
decades now.Why keep asking it?

Of the three
parties, the FibDems say the most encouraging things about regional
devolution, quite pointlessly since they remain bound to work with one of two
larger parties that hate the very idea.

The fact remains that all the countries of the United Kingdom
are conquered countries.Scotland was
(and still is) conquered with bribes.The others were all conquered by unimaginably violent means.Those who sit in London and fine-tune the unwritten
constitution are all accessories after the fact.They are not our friends.They laugh at the aspiration to be free of London rule.And they seriously expect us to see the
joke.Go on, pull the other one.

Last week, plans were announced for a Bucks / Oxon / Northants
combined authority, a move that raises important questions of local and
regional identity.We’re assured that
this is just a practical measure of co-operation that won’t affect day-to-day
services but these things have a habit of acquiring their own momentum.

The case for a combined authority is that it might unlock
billions of pounds of public spending.It can make the case for new infrastructure, such as an Oxford-Cambridge
expressway or completion of the East-West Rail Link.But can’t the councils already do that?For better or for worse, it could open up for
development those relatively sparsely-populated areas that form Oxfordshire’s
historic boundaries with its eastern and northern neighbours.These are areas that have remained
undeveloped because they’ve been on the edge, although the edge may be where
they’re comfortable being.

One danger of the realignment is that past investment in
infrastructure will be under-valued, with Oxford’s
strategic position in the Upper
Thames Valley
ignored.With its M4, M40 and A34 links
and its close connections with Swindon, Newbury and Reading,
Oxford sits far more naturally within a Wessex region looking west to Bristol
and south to the Solent.For starters, consider where the Environment
Agency, the BBC or the NHS ambulance service place it.Whatever happened to joined-up government?

There’s no doubt that combined authorities are in favour
with Whitehall
right now – and on a cross-party basis – but that ought to set alarm bells
ringing.Not being directly elected,
their mandate is at one remove from voters.And if what they do is ‘unlock’ money from Whitehall, how did the money come to be
locked up in the first place?

It’s our money, paid in taxes to London.We shouldn’t need begging-bowl consortia of councils to make the case
for having it drip-fed back to us.A
proper, directly elected regional assembly – such as the one Wessex
Regionalists demand, and Wessex is 8 million strong – would keep our region’s
taxes as of right and spend them on the priorities that matter to us, not the
ones handed down from Whitehall.

Too remote?Not as
remote as Whitehall,
while the ‘headroom’ above county councils would ensure their continued existence
as local bodies directly accountable for their decisions.Something that ad hoc groupings cannot.Refusing to think on a truly regional basis
is a fault that will come back to bite local government badly.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England is good at collecting
statistics.It may be no more than a
gnat on the side of the development elephant but at least it knows how to
document the scale of the deception being practised upon us by the London regime. However, there is rather more to the data than a first glance suggests.

Localism, we were promised.Figures published by CPRE – in a pamphlet optimistically called A Landmark Year for the Countryside – show
that in the last accounting year (2013/14), Whitehall overruled 67% of the major housing
refusals by local councils.In 2008/09 it
overruled just 31%.That’s a measure not
so much of which party is in power or of philosophical attitudes to localism but
of how far the easy solutions have been used up, leaving the controversial ones
to follow.There are currently plans to
build 700,000 homes in the countryside, including 200,000 on Green Belt
land.

Government figures estimate that
previously developed – 'brownfield' – land could accommodate 1.5 million homes, but 1.5 million isn’t
enough for the population growth that the London
parties favour. And CPRE must know this, even if it won't admit it: assuming 2 persons per home, the current net immigration rate of 250,000 a year, and even that no homes are sold to the existing population as it spreads out or re-locates, 1.5 million homes is only 12 years supply.Besides, brownfield land
is more expensive to develop, leading housebuilders to claim that in order to
make a profit they'd have to charge housebuyers more. Or reduce their contributions to local infrastructure. Not only that, but some "brownfield" land is beautiful parkland, such as that surrounding Victorian asylums. Some is deep in the countryside, such as disused airfields that might more rationally be dug up and returned to farmland.

There's another statistical deception that also goes unnoticed. It's said that the supply of brownfield land is continually being renewed as old uses are abandoned, leaving factories, warehouses, hospitals and the like to be redeveloped. That's true, but if the uses are relocating to greenfield sites – which they often are – then countryside is lost just as if it had gone for housing. We just don't get so worked up about the figures because they aren't presented in the same high-profile way. It's also assumed that non-housing uses have more of a 'right' to expand into the countryside, being socially or economically 'essential' and with less flexibility over where to locate. It's all part of the prejudice that measures development as 'progress' but is selective about measuring the loss to those rural environments into which development is progressing. Successive governments – though not this one – have had targets for the proportion of housing built on brownfield sites. None has dared have a target for any of the other uses. And so no-one grasps the overall picture. Politically, no-one wants to. There's something inherently negative about measuring the total loss of farmland rather than the increase of goodies that take its place. Folk might even panic about where their future food will come from. As well they might.

CPRE is a fine example of a safety valve, ‘moderately’ and
deferentially expressing what needs to be uncompromising rage if it’s to be
effective.Its stance only serves to perpetuate
the myth that planning decisions are essentially ‘fair’ and ‘reasonable’,
rather than bought by the development lobby through party donations aimed at changing
national policy.CPRE naively supports HS2,
thinking it might reduce the building of new roads and runways.It won’t.You’ll have those too.Its
pamphlet congratulates its Northumberland branch for ensuring that 70% of new
homes in and around Newcastle
will be on brownfield sites.So 30% will
be on farmland?Is that sustainable
development?If that’s the best that can
be achieved on Tyneside – a depressed area if ever there was one – what chance
does the Wessex
countryside have?

Monday, December 15, 2014

Last week, an environmental coalition – Butterfly
Conservation, the League Against Cruel Sports, the Mammal Society, the
Ramblers, the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts – held a ‘Rally for Nature’ at the Palace of Westminster.Why?To lobby MPs ahead of the next election, reminding them of how important
nature is.

MPs need reminding.Because across Wessex,
wildlife is under siege.In Alton, for example,
there’s currently a campaign to save its wildflower meadows from housebuilders.This area is a beautiful example of Hampshire countryside and a haven for butterflies.Spearheading development at Alton is the Homes & Communities Agency,
a central government quango.Yes, it’s
our own taxes that are paying for our destruction.

Any campaign against imposed development has our
support.Wessex
is, for us, a community of communities, every one of which must be truly free
to decide its own future, without interference from those in London who think they know best.

But how effective are these isolated actions?The rallies.The petitions.The
implorings?Not very.Look at Winchester.At Twyford Down, the Department of Transport
carved the M3 through one of the most heavily ‘protected’ landscapes in England.Nearby, the battle for Barton Farm was lost,
due to the winning combination of Winchester
College as landowner, a
dogged developer, and a government that spectacularly failed to deliver on
localism.

The system can be beaten.Occasionally, a developer goes away empty-handed.But such cases are all too rare.They serve mainly as ammunition for those who
claim that the system works and that it can
be beaten, with reasoned argument, and that therefore there’s no cause to
change it.Most folk don’t engage with
the system until it impinges on them,
and so they fail to see the bigger picture, the campaigners in neighbouring shires
facing the same developers, the same arguments, the same strategies aimed at
defeating them.They place their faith
in non-party pressure groups like County Wildlife Trusts or the Campaign to Protect
Rural England.More hardened campaigners
refer to them as the ‘fluffies’, those who are simply too nice to win.

They really are their own worst enemies.They lose because even when they do think
politically they do not act politically.Development is being imposed on Wessex by a
Tory/FibDem coalition.So what does Wessex do?It votes Tory or FibDem.Alton
has a Tory MP (with 57% of the vote).Its district council,
East Hampshire, is 100% Tory/FibDem.Hampshire County Council is 79% Tory/FibDem.You get the lies you voted for.These are folk from whom you cannot expect anything
better.And you chose them to represent your
views. Do they not represent your views? Then why do you keep voting for them?

How do they get away with it?ALL London-party politicians play pass-the-parcel.MPs will insist that planning
decisions are for local councils to make and nothing to do with them.But councillors will point out that as
decisions can be overturned by Whitehall
they are never truly masters in their own house.Some of them undoubtedly enjoy putting the
blame on the faceless mandarins, knowing that voting loyalties are too tribal
for this to make any difference at all come polling day.

Because who would you vote for if the Tories and FibDems
disgust you?The argument goes that
there’s only one realistic alternative – the Labour bogeyman – and that ‘socialist’
Labour would be so much worse.That’s
widely believed because it happens to be widely true. (Except for the socialism, transformed long
ago into the petty spitefulness of political correctness, which, being obsessed
with individual reward and punishment, is everything but social.)Labour are the party of Big Growth.But no more so than the other London parties.Labour are worse because, as an urban party,
they aren’t shy about destroying the countryside.For them, protecting countryside is the hobby
of the well-heeled who want to keep house prices up.

Maybe, but the butterflies have committed no crime.Those who defend them may well be sincere in
believing that a better England
is not the overcrowded concrete jungle it’s becoming.The problem for the Tories and FibDems is
that the outrage is bound to grow as ever-more-sensitive sites reach the top of
the ‘to build on’ list.That’s when a
belief in the free market reaches revulsion point.Labour meanwhile, accustomed to State intervention
as a means to facilitate growth, not to reverse it, are left hopelessly unable
to respond to that opportunity.Grand
analysis gives way to marginal differences.Should we build more flats in villages?Or convert old Dutch barns in the middle of nowhere?Would using floodplains for housing be fine if we just
raised defences?What’s the cleverest
way to undermine support for the Green Belt?

No wonder UKIP are rejoicing.UKIP can expect to pick up votes from three
sources.There are the true believers,
those who think that to be really cynical is to be really cool.Then there are the protest votes, finding a
home, any home, that gives vent to their anger and frustration.Finally, there are those who are easily
fooled into thinking that UKIP is them.Those who believe, for example, that UKIP is
an anti-immigration party when it has made clear that it’s nothing of the
kind.It’s pro-immigration, but
on the UK’s
own terms.

And so it goes: Third World
immigrants might work for less than eastern Europeans.Don’t mention the argument that filling a
glut of vacancies by stripping developing countries of their most skilled
workers is far from fraternal.Or ask
what it is that made those countries so relatively unattractive.Above all, keep folk well-confused and
focused on immigration – THEM – instead of on population, which is them AND us.UKIP is yet another economically libertarian
party, whose main gripe is that the EU, unlike little Britain, might
just conceivably stand up for sovereignty and tell the globalists and the growth
junkies where to go.

A vote for UKIP is not good, but neither is it bad.In the long view, anything that breaks up the
hereditary, class-based tribalism of British politics has to be a positive
development.The more fragmented the
vote becomes, the less credible it will be to continue with first-past-the-post
or with a media focus on just the ‘top three’.Those who have left the Tories behind will have shown that it’s possible
to move on.And beyond UKIP, or maybe
the Greens (enthusiasts for ‘green growth’, so hardly sound), lies what?Territorial parties like ours have a vital
role to play in the 21st century.The long-term
limitation of UKIP is that it isn’t actually interested in the territory of the
UK, in the way that, for
example, the nationalist parties are interested in the territory
of Scotland, Wales or Cornwall.For UKIP, the UK is just Airstrip One.Any hint to the contrary in its 2010
manifesto need not be taken seriously, since its own leader condemned it as
‘drivel’.

Essentially, the smaller the territorial focus of politics,
the better the chances of defeating Big Growth, because the closer the
connection between those who make decisions and those who live with the consequences.That might suggest localism rather than
regionalism, let alone europeanism, but there’s no contradiction so long as
subsidiarity is observed.Wider solidarity
can avoid one area being set against another for a third party’s benefit.Regions, properly designed from below (not
the Prescott zones
imposed from above) can be a shield for local democracy, not its negation.

We want a self-governing Wessex because we want a completely
different kind of politics, taking for granted changes like proportional
representation to break the hold of the old parties here.Instead of admiring Switzerland, with its
self-governing cantons, citizen initiatives and binding referenda, why not
imitate it?What are we waiting for?Why would we rather choose to be beggars
before the lords and members of a despotic and self-obsessed Parliament, the
guardians of an English democratic tradition that objective observers might
judge to be no better than tyranny?We should talk politics with our neighbours, because they are part of our ability to change whatever we choose, not
with our MPs, who exist only to abuse the power we lend them.

In 1992, we issued a pamphlet entitled Your Region Needs You!Its ever-more-relevant
conclusion is as follows:

“Wessex is for its
people West-Saxon or not, native or settler who cherish it for what it could be
and should be.But what of its future
without regionalisation?The answer is
disaster! – The remedy in your hands…?”

Friday, December 5, 2014

Good chancellor, bad chancellor.George Osborne played a little double act
with himself this week.It started with
lots of spending announcements.A
whopping £15.1 billion on roads and £2.3 billion on flood defences.Oh, and Bicester is to be a new town.

Then there was the Autumn Statement, seized on with the
claim that public spending as a share of GDP could be heading back to the
levels of 80 years ago.A golden age as
far as the Tories are concerned.Grinding
poverty, plus all-round militarism.The
Jarrow March and the Blackshirts.Plus
the Greenshirts having a go at the bankers: sounds familiar?

How do we reconcile spend, spend, spend with a policy of
downsizing that has no end in sight?

The spending announcements are real, but not all new.Some just firm up details of spending already
announced.And at Bicester, many of the
houses have already been built.Smoke
and mirrors then.Just what you’d expect
from a government with a former PR man at the helm.

The roads programme can be unpicked from many angles.One is to point out that an opportunity to
rebalance the national economy away from over-reliance on London has been under-played.The self-fulfilling prophecy of ‘invest in
success’ has triumphed again, with £250 million re-pledged for yet another
Lower Thames Crossing near Dartford.At least development at the estuary would take
some of the pressure off the environment (and house prices) in eastern Wessex.But not a lot.

Wessex
gets at least £500 million for two miles of tunnel to by-pass Stonehenge.Cornwall and
Devon have been agitating for years to put the environment of Somerset
and Wiltshire at their service, speeding up access to the London market.Why is the London market so much more important than any
other?That’s where the money is.And why do we allow that to happen?Turning the A303 into a motorway in all but
name won’t just increase accessibility to London.It will increase accessibility FROM London, cutting precious
minutes off the drive to the weekend cottage in Salcombe.

But for how long?The
strategic vision for roads spending does not include the words ‘Peak Oil’.Instead it reassures us as follows:

“In the short to medium
term, as domestic production declines, our dependence on imported oil and gas
will grow and we will become increasingly exposed to the pressures and risks of
global markets. Over the same period, global energy consumption is anticipated to increase significantly, implying increasing competition for available resources. Despite this, fuel costs are not projected to rise significantly over this time period.”

Apparently,
that’s all down to increased fuel efficiency.And wishful thinking.And beyond
the short to medium term?Infrastructure
is for the long term.Are we planning
for the next five years, or the next fifty?Are we buying the wrong kind of infrastructure because no-one will admit
to the necessity of a radical re-think?We aren’t building a resilient future, because we can’t accept that the
comfortable present is just an illusion.

So the spending plans are all part of hiding the harsh
facts.The real state of public finances
ought to give real cause for concern.An
analysis of the background to the Autumn Statement done by The Independent (a London newspaper) shows that the plan to boost growth relies on
boosting borrowing by the general public:

“According to the
small print in the latest report from the Office for Budget Responsibility
(OBR), the public is forecast to add to its pile of unsecured lending, which
includes credit card debt and bank overdrafts, by £360bn over the next five
years.If the public fails to spend,
then growth would collapse and the Government’s deficit would be likely to
start increasing again.The £360bn
figure represents a £41bn increase on the OBR’s forecasts just nine months ago
and would take households’ unsecured lending, as a share of total household
incomes, to a record 55 per cent by 2020.That would be well above even the pre-financial crisis unsecured debt
ratio of 44 per cent.”

Add-in secured lending, like mortgages, and total household
debt is projected to rise from £1.7trn to £2.6trn by the end of the
decade.With that figure rising faster
than incomes, the ratio of total household debt to household incomes will rise
from 169% to a new high of 184%.But
this has to happen if public spending is to be cut, because economies are
sustained by spending and if the Government is unable or unwilling to run a big
budget deficit, then someone else has to.(Even though governments, as a lower risk, can borrow more cheaply than
anyone else.)Like all Ponzi schemes,
it’s about using an imagined future to sustain the actual present.And it’s a trick that only works so long as the
population continues to grow and natural resources continue to come on-stream
to support it.

One of the easiest ways to grow the economy, here and
worldwide, is to spend more on armaments, things created for the sole purpose
of being destroyed.Civilian expenditure
meets human needs, which are finite.Military expenditure is not subject to any such limit.At September’s NATO summit in Newport, the UK successfully lobbied for defence
spending to be raised to 2% of GDP across the alliance.Military budgets ought to have some
relationship to expected outcomes but
a budget expressed in terms of inputs
– a percentage share of GDP – looks very suspicious.A 2% share doesn’t automatically translate
into a given level of security, not least because it fluctuates with the size
of the economy.All it does for sure is sustain
or increase NATO orders placed with the arms trade.DO panic, because panic is good for business.

With the NHS, schools and overseas aid budgets protected,
defence now set to be protected too, and pensions politically unassailable, the
Chancellor has little room for manoeuvre.Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies said this week that
voters would be justified in asking whether Osborne was planning “a fundamental reimagining of the role of
the state”.

Others are planning a fundamental reimagining of the state
too.Not so much in terms of its role as
in terms of its territory.Scotland and perhaps Wales
may yet see a future outside the UK as more attractive than one
within.England will not be so lucky.Our political establishment is so entwined
with the City financial establishment that we can only break free by
reimagining both our constitution and our economy, dispersing power and wealth
to the regions.And on a scale beyond
what it’s acceptable to contemplate in London.

It has to be, because the cost of maintaining the status quo
is unsustainable and this cannot be admitted.If power is to remain centralised it cannot remain even nominally democratic
because that would cost too much, and if it’s to become truly democratic it
cannot remain centralised because that would cost too much as well.The really big savings come from letting go,
from setting areas free to do their own thing, precisely what the likes of
Michael Gove or Eric Pickles, or any other champions of ‘British values’ handed
down from above, are in politics to prevent.

Those who wish the grip to tighten really need no
identification.Those who wish it to end
are to be found among nationalist and regionalist movements across Europe, each
one sparklingly particular, but linked in solidarity against centralism.The politics of change today is
territorial.The choice is between
non-government – in the sense of a state whose will to intervene has shrunk
back to defending the property of a global elite – and self-government – in the
sense of a society organised for the benefit of the community.

The Labour Party sits uneasily between these two
visions.Miliband – with his call for
‘responsible capitalism’ – is as determined as Cameron to outsource the job of
government but thinks asking for things nicely might help.Having ditched Clause 4, what remains of
Labour cannot be other than fraudulent, all sound-bites and cheesy grins.The public appetite for taking back the
commanding heights of the economy is huge but Labour no longer knows how to
tell that story.In the Celtic nations
it’s losing ground to those who can.The
English regions will follow.

One of the lies that Thatcher got away with all too easily
was that the State doesn’t have any money.All the money it has is money taken from taxpayers.Not true.That’s the kind of state that has sold off or given away every other
source of revenue, from land, from minerals, from trading services and from
sovereign monopolies.And done so
because it’s clear to the politicians responsible that a state dependent solely
on taxation will be a precarious state.It’s a state left without those assets that could have given it a high
degree of practical independence (and which therefore now need to be
repossessed).The Thatcherite State,
designed to be economically crippled, cannot avoid becoming politically
crippled.It’s a state with a
death-wish, clinging to an exalted imperial vision it can no longer fund,
digging an ever deeper hole for itself.

If that’s truly the state of the UK, then we need to imagine its
replacements and work to bring them into being.We must defend our local
services, and link them regionally.If the London
regime won’t do these things for us then we need to do them ourselves.Or it will take us down with it.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party in England & Wales
(& Cornwall)
was one of the panel on BBC Radio 4’s Any
Questions? this week.To the
amazement of anyone concerned about the ecological crisis we face, she launched
into an impassioned defence of massive urban development and a rejection of those measures that might keep population growth within locally acceptable bounds.

So, what’s the Green Party for?Why does it pretend to be part of the
solution when it clearly has the same analysis of the problem as all the other
London-based parties?Namely that the
damage done by growth is to be cured by yet more growth.It has over recent years courted the
red-green vote, by playing up the red, but seemingly at the expense of the
green.

All parties are constantly challenged to say what they would
do to create more jobs.A really
courageous party would challenge the question.We don’t need the maximum number of jobs.We need the optimum number of jobs for the
optimum size of population, given the sensible limits that define our region’s
place in a sustainable world.The UK has far, far
too many jobs for its size, many of them in the wrong places and many of them
financially profitable (for others) but socially useless and environmentally harmful.That’s one reason why it’s importing folk at
the rate of 250,000 a year net.It also
has a failed education and welfare system, because it has 2 million unemployed
who should be matched to the jobs available and trained to do them if they lack
the skills.Come on, this isn’t rocket
science, it’s the basic sustainability that corporate interests prevent us enjoying.

Growth isn’t necessary for economic reasons.It’s necessary only for fiscal reasons,
because without it the UK
cannot pay the interest on the imaginary debts it’s been fooled by bankers into
believing that it owes.The continued
refusal to confront this fact is what’s leading to planet-wide disaster as rising
debt outstrips the capacity of the real, resource-limited economy.

Friday, November 28, 2014

In Nineteen Eighty-Four,
Orwell painted a picture of the future as a boot stamping on a human face,
forever.The boot now has a name.TTIP.The Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership.Hammered out in secret talks between Europe
and the USA,
it will make democracy illegal, by giving corporations the right to sue
governments for passing laws that restrict their profits, such as laws that
raise environmental or social protection.

Campaign group 38 Degrees gave evidence this week to a
select committee at Westminster.One of their members described the experience
as follows:

“This week I was
shouted at by a group of MPs.

I'd been asked to
explain to the Business Select Committee why 38 Degrees members are so worried
about TTIP.That's the dodgy EU-US trade
deal that could bring further privatisation of our NHS.But once I got there, they didn’t seem to
want to hear why we were against privatisation.Or why we want to stop American corporations having the power to sue our
government in secret courts.

Instead they attacked
38 Degrees members for wanting to have a say.They kept arguing that 38 Degrees members didn’t know enough to have
valid opinions about the deal.And when
I said we don’t trust politicians to deal with something as important as this
behind closed doors, the chairman told me to shut up!”

If, like us, you’re sceptical about the value of trade and
concerned about the threat that trade poses to democracy, you’ll understand
where he’s coming from.TTIP has to be
defeated but, in the long term, it’s just as important to defeat the mindset –
totalitarian liberalism – that thinks something like TTIP could ever be
acceptable in a society that values vital democracy.We’ve become numbed to the idea that it’s not
for business to compete for access to our markets, it’s for nations to compete
for the privilege of investment by businesses.Because if the businesses are disobeyed, they have the power (that we
gave to them) to lay waste to everything.Faced with the threat of our sovereignty now being for sale, defence is
nowhere near enough.Politics must
re-conquer economics or go down fighting. A boycott of US goods might be a start?

It’s just a shame that David Babbs – the man who now
complains about being shouted at – is the man who decided only last year that the
voters of Eastleigh ought not to hear from
Colin Bex.

Here’s a story from the North
Somerset Times, a story with outlines applicable throughout Wessex, and
maybe across other regions too:

“A long-standing
member of North Somerset’s Conservative party
has resigned from the organisation which he believes ‘has no interest’ in the
area’s issues.

Arthur Terry, who
is the representative for Portishead’s East Ward on North Somerset Council, has
left the party and will continue his work for residents as an independent
councillor.

Cllr Terry has been
a Tory party member since 1981 and was elected to Woodspring Council [as North Somerset
Council was then known] in 1984.

He cites issues
including police funding and new housing figure demands as reasons for leaving
the Conservatives.

He said: ‘Over the
years it has become increasingly clear to me that the national political
parties of all persuasions have no interest in this area.

‘This is demonstrated
by their repeated failure to address the serious inequities in the distribution
of the revenue support grant to our local authorities and it would appear the
consistent failure of our local Members of Parliament to influence this.

‘Clearly as a lone
voice I can do little to influence these issues, but I can be honest and no
longer represent a party that has no interest in the views and concerns of
ordinary members.’

Comment is barely necessary.Centralist diktat steamrollers on, oblivious to promises of localism.Unfair funding arrangements continue.Protests to those at the top of the
London-based parties go unheeded.Experienced local
councillors draw their own conclusions, and so we see the centuries of
deference to London
dominance slowly start to wither and die at the root.

On 9th November 2014, Catalonia voted 4
to 1 for independence from Spain.Madrid isn’t ready to begin talks on
separation.Instead, it’s determined to prosecute
Catalonia’s leading nationalists for organising the vote. Will David Cameron protest?Will there be airstrikes?

On 20th November 2014, the French Parliament voted to abolish many of
the historic regions of France through forced mergers, against the wishes of
those affected.An amendment calling for
the reunification of Brittany – split since the Vichy era between two regions,
one predominantly non-Breton – was haughtily rejected.Will David Cameron protest?Will there be airstrikes?

In both these states, the full force of the law is being used to crush democratic
feeling.All in defence of the outdated
primacy of ‘France’ and ‘Spain’, and of the power of centralist politicians to glorify
a long-dead past and view other, more human-scale loyalties as a threat.This is what happens when the Europe of a
Hundred Flags steps up from bookish theory to impassioned practice.There are those who really don’t like the
idea one bit.Warmongers,
austerity-merchants and lovers of technocracy.David Cameron is among them, so watch this space.

Let’s step back to 14th November for an insight into the true depth of
establishment paranoia.Cornelius Adebahr’s
article for the Carnegie Endowment explores the problems facing a fragmenting
Europe, from the perspective that fragmentation is somehow a ‘bad thing’.Xenophobic hatred certainly is, but that
isn’t the subject matter of debate among Europeans seeking greater
autonomy.All we want is genuine
subsidiarity free from centralist manipulation.

Including the power to judge for ourselves what functions we’re capable
of exercising.Europe is in crisis
because it has become a project of elite dominance, the preserve of a
managerialist class that denies the right – or even the ability – of ordinary folk
to shape their own governance.Adebahr
sneers at what he terms ‘populism’ because it’s too democratic.He sneers at nationalism because it isn’t
driven by a narrowly economic conception of rationality.Because it rejects that ‘rationality’ in
which economic power rests not with democratic states but with anonymous global
‘investors’ shopping around for the choicest bargain.

The Europe of the Investors is an integrated economic space in which
barriers to the movement of capital do not exist and democratic ownership of key
economic assets is repeatedly eroded.Together, these two things make it easy for markets to punish
policy-makers who dare to be different. (UK governments make things more
than usually hard for themselves – and for us – for contorted ideological
reasons that stem from City overlordship of our political system.)Populism is labelled as bad
because it’s the opposite of what we might call investism.TTIP and the Lisbon Treaty are part of the
process of declaring democracy illegal worldwide because it cannot be
guaranteed to put investor interests first.And we now see in France and Spain on which side of the argument
nationalists and regionalists are judged to stand.Voting is the way to change everything, or it
is nothing.OK, nothing it is then.

We’ve made clear our own view that vital industries, utilities and
public services must be owned and controlled locally and regionally – not
bought and sold by the multi-nationals.Common ownership is a widely held ideal, even among Conservatives.The consensus now needs to be put into
effect.Obviously, not through Labour
or its continental equivalents, all tainted beyond recognition, but through
radical nationalist and regionalist alternatives.

How radical?Should compensation
be paid to the present owners?And if
so, how much?If the aim is to achieve
common ownership, in the public
interest, can the private (or foreign
public) interests represented by compensation claims be viewed as anything but self-centred
trivia, irrelevant to the core issue of achieving economic democracy?Or should those who invested in good faith be
reimbursed, it being no fault of theirs if they sank money into a politically
sensitive industry?In short, is the
current set-up a crime against society or just a mistake?Have the investment giants earned our rage or
our pity?

Any such theories of ‘fairness’ can be laboured so as to slow down necessary
progress.Even to visualise the issue as
a transaction is to bow to a hostile point of view.Why not decouple progress from that which
retards it?Why not take back now, and
pay back later (if at all)? Our thinking has been so polluted by investism – even governments claim to be 'investing' in roads or a better NHS when what they mean is they're devoting more resources to transport or healthcare – that we miss the most obvious, direct answers to our problems. Cut the Gordian knot. Or perhaps, in the case of PFI, the Gordon knot.

Bear in mind (a) that many of our nationalised industries were created by
seizing municipal assets without compensation (and this sort of thing still
goes on, quite shamelessly), (b) that they were then privatised at an average 30%
discount on the market price, (c) that as natural monopolies they have
continued to be cash cows ever since, and (d) that corporations spent – and spend
– millions on subverting the democratic debate, belying the idea that they
exist only to serve.False title.False value.False benefit.False intent.It would be entirely reasonable to conclude
that the owners are worth rather less to us than they claim. Moreover, the owners aren't the ones who know how to run buses, trains, power plants or treatment works in Wessex. Their only expertise is in financial engineering, which any sane society would be better off without. So how do we value their contribution? On balance, negatively. THEY should be paying US. At the very least, let's start the negotiations at nil and work upwards EVER so reluctantly. We can't increase taxes or borrowing, so the third option it has to be.

What we need is not so much ‘UK plc’ as ‘Wessex Common Estate’, our
resources managed for this and for future generations.Public assets belong to everyone, born and
unborn, and should only ever be leased, never sold, let alone given away.We need a politics of stewardship, not a
politics of trading.Friends are
motivated by love to share, willingly, within the restraints of a common bond. Enemies are motivated by fear to trade,
suspiciously, without the restraints of a common bond.It’s true for us, it’s true for Europe, and
it’s true for the world.You share with
your friends and you trade with your enemies.What does that say about those who want global trade to grow?

Europe stands at a crossroads.A
second Berlin Wall can come tumbling down, destroying the needless political
centralism of old global empires AND, if the will is there, the needless economic
centralism of new global corporations too.These are two causes that can make common cause in delivering what folk
clearly want to see happen. Either that, or the
military will be on the streets to make sure it doesn’t happen.That’s how scared the bullies are.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Thanks to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 we know that the next
General Election will be on 7th May 2015.This means that small parties with few resources and little flexibility
now have the same chance to plan ahead as the London-based big battalions with
their ear to the ground at Westminster.

WR President Colin Bex and Secretary-General David Robins were in
Bridgwater today, in one of the Party’s possible target seats.Bridgwater is a much under-rated place, proud
of its past and with good reason but, as a working-class town hit by plant
closures, also one concerned about its future.There were some cracking good conversations to be had on the main
shopping streets, and real interest in an alternative to the status quo.Colin was being shadowed by an independent film production company
looking to follow him throughout the campaign.Along with the flag, they proved to be a valuable visual prompt to
passing members of the public to stop and talk.

After Bridgwater, Colin travelled on to Truro for the Mebyon Kernow Annual
Conference, an event WR members try to attend whenever possible. With the Cornish now
recognised as a national minority and the campaign for a Cornish Assembly again
making waves, it can only be a matter of time before those in the English
regions look closely at their Celtic neighbours and start to ask why they can’t
have some of that new politics too. Our power. Our wealth. Let's have them back.

Friday, November 7, 2014

The Scots recently held a referendum on independence.They discussed what currency to use, whether
to join NATO, and what to do about Trident.

BBC West’s televised debate on devolution this week took a different
approach.At one point, the politicians
on the panel were challenged with the problem of different wheelie bins on
opposite sides of the same street in Kingswood, on the Bristol fringe.It’s a common enough phenomenon on the
boundaries between London
boroughs but Londoners have other things to get excited about.Like what to spend our taxes on next.

Anyone watching from Dorset or Wiltshire must have been deeply
disappointed that Bristol
hogged the limelight.It wasn’t even as
if the politicians were that well-informed.South Gloucestershire’s Leader went on about the 1,000-year-old county
boundaries, unaware that Bristol’s
boundary with its rural neighbours dates from 1951.A long time ago now, but not before the
Norman Conquest.

What this clearly wasn’t was a debate on devolution.Not until the very end, when the Wessex
Wyvern was raised and a show of hands sought on whether or not we need the same
powers as Scotland.The ‘No’ vote won, but a surprisingly large
number of hands went up for ‘Yes’, considering that this was a proposition the
programme-makers had largely sought to bury beneath a mantle of municipal
minutiae.

It could have been worse.Viewers
might have been, yet again, denied the knowledge that a regionalist alternative
exists.Viewers elsewhere in Wessex were
indeed denied that knowledge.

There is no regional television channel that serves the whole of Wessex.Its creation has been one of our aims since
1979.Meanwhile, the BBC divides Wessex into the
four sub-regions into which it naturally divides geographically.The north-west is served from Bristol, the south-west from Plymouth,
and the south-east from Southampton.The north-east is served from Southampton
too, via bases in Reading and Oxford.The way these various stations treated the devolution issue varied
enormously, illustrating one of the challenges for a regionalist party whose
aspirations the centre struggles to recognise and accommodate.

BBC West, from the Bristol
Cathedral Choir
School, did as well as could be expected.A range of views was aired, but the Wyvern
was the only splash of colour in an otherwise drab offering.On Twitter, the programme was variously
described as dreadful, dire and dreary, with the limited capabilities of the
superficial Points West format coming
in for criticism.One tweet sums up the
reaction: “I wish I had gone to bed
instead of watching.”

BBC South West, from Cornwall’s Eden
Project, could have had a Wessex
presence too.Their researcher was in
discussions with our President, Colin Bex, in late October but by early
November he’d been dropped from the shortlist.Mebyon Kernow’s Leader, Cllr Dick Cole, put in a sustained effort on the
night but it would have been good to allow viewers east of the Tamar to know
that they too have an alternative to the London-centric status quo.Subsequent tweets suggested that the English
south-west had been badly let down by the programme-makers – but if they will exclude
the one political party that has something specific to say about the English
south-west then you have to expect that.

BBC South, serving the heart of Alfred’s kingdom, was the one station
where you might think a Wessex Regionalist presence would be imperative.Apparently not.The South didn’t even get a programme to
itself, but a joint one with the South East.One of the presenters agonised over whether the area had any coherent sense
of regional identity.Define it like
that and it’s not hard to find the answer.

Now, we know that BBC stations do talk to each other.They share contact details and get each other
to film extra footage or record audio that they can pass around (and they
co-produce the occasional programme, like Late
Kick Off).We hope they go on doing
so.What they seemingly do not do is
share editorial perspective.When The Case for Wessex was launched at
Wantage in 2003, BBC South turned up to film the event.Other BBC stations in Wessex declined
to cover the story at all.Not in their
area.True, Wantage is not, but Wessex
is.

Politicians and media alike share a local perspective that is set within
a national context.Regions perplex
them.Too big to be local.Too small to be national.That’s right.They’re something in between, the missing piece of the jigsaw, the piece
whose absence explains why the governance of Britain is so dysfunctional.Imagining the difference that having them
will make is not easy, though Scotland
and Wales
are there to be visited should you need a model.The benefits will be clear enough once regions
are in place in England.Those benefits will be forever denied us though,
without the ability to see over the hedge.